What to do with dwightsilverman.com?

Dan Gillmor is fond of saying that readers know more than the journalists who write for them. Here’s hoping that’s correct, because I seek your collective wisdom.

I’m looking for some ideas. For more than 10 years, I’ve run www.dwightsilverman.com as my personal Web site. Most recently, it served as an alternate index page for the things I write for the Chronicle.

But once I started this blog, keeping it up became a chore. Right now it’s in limbo while I figure out what to do with it.

What do you think I should do on dwightsilverman.com? I don’t want to use that domain for this blog — I’d rather keep the blogs.chron.com URL for consistency.

I’m not interested in making it a personal blog because, well, my personal life is not all that interesting!

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15 Responses

Simple: Maintain the DS.com domain name, and let it redirect to your blog and its Chron URL. That means anyone typing in dwightsilverman.com into a browser (and people inevitably will, either because they remember it from past use or because they assume it goes somewhere) will find you.

Dwight, as I’ve figured out over the years…if you can’t figure out what to do with the domain in a few minutes, chances are you won’t have the motivation or desire to keep it up, hence the same reason why my sites never get updated.

My suggestions…hold the domain, use it for personal email forwarding, and spend the time with your kids rather than posting more stuff. Now if I could just figure that out and finally get around to updating my site!

Dwight does not want to set up catcams on his vanity domain’s site. But… but… but… I have learned and applied so much from setting up catcams! Wireless networking USB bandwidth/conflicts Camera lighting HTML JavaScript Streaming Keeping track of …

Your best use might be to just use it as a base for all your personal projects and portfolio pieces. Do you have any side jobs that you maintain or edit on occasion? Any personal writings or muses that you wish to put out there? Photography? Maybe you could put up a gallery of photos you enjoy or have taken.

If none of these suggestions pan out, here’s what I’d do if I had time and desire on my own site. Since I’m visiting websites all the time and reading different blogs, I’d try to design a site that hosts all of the different places I visit on a daily basis, or collect as many feeds as exist to house them on there for my personal reading. You can make public what you want and then keep private the rest. For instance, instead of going to my favorites or bookmarks to access the pages to check my bank statements or credit card statements or phone bills, etc, I could just post these links on a webpage, or better yet figure out if there’s a way to post the login boxes that would let me login directly to any of these sites without having to go through their sites. I’d finally link any other sites that are of interest to me whether they have feeds or not, such as eBay or IMDB.

1. Set it up to forward to your Chron blog: dead simple, no maintenance, your URL stays relevant.

2. Run a linkblog for all your personal bookmarks. There’s probably software out there to mine these from your del.icio.us account to make it low-maintenance.

3. Turn it into an ultra-simple page pointing to your Flickr photos (assuming you use Flickr, and occasionally upload photos). Flickr will generate code to do this for you, see http://www.flickr.com/badge_new.gne. If you have nothing more on your top page than the Flickr badge, then this is another no-maintenance option.

4. Put a wiki on it for your personal use. I have a wiki in a hidden and htaccess protected area on my vanity site. I use it for all manner of personal notes that I want to be able to access from anywhere. With this option there’s no pressure to publish with any frequency because you’re the only one who uses it.

Google marketing! With a popular URL that is probably all over Google, you can offer up some new links and meta tags and BAM…a couple of other sites get top Google rankings. I had this happen inadvertently a couple of years ago, and discovered it only because my meta tag had a typo that showed prominently on the Google results, but not the page itself (obviously).